IOWA CITY, IA – William O’Neal II glances over his laptop screen every time the front door scrapes the sidewalk above, the extended whoooosh of escaping current like an airlock depressurizing. One of those rare moments when sound has a feel.
He watches the newest bargoers descend the carpeted stairs into the Dublin Underground, a subterranean Irish pub in the heart of town.
O’Neal picked this particular booth – a worn wooden pew of stark right angles, second on the left – to be his workspace a few weeks earlier. A poetry fellow at the world-renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he needed one of those public-private spots where he could be both amid humanity while also tucked away and unbothered. Bell jar-like.
His friend Eva Long suggested this bar, and he’d felt an uncanny spark in the Dublin right away. An otherworldliness almost, as though he’d rolled aside a rock and discovered a hidden city, bustling, full of history and lore.
“I can be anywhere in the world in this place,” he says. And cheap Guinness pours only lubricate the mystique.
